In Gaza, the Wait to Rebuild Lingers

In Gaza, even cement is political, and plans for reconstruction are caught in a web of fraught relationships that could take months to untangle.

SABRINA TAVERNISE

GAZA — The skies have gone quiet, the cease-fire seems to be holding, and with thousands of homes destroyed in Israel’s war with Hamas, people here have a new concern: rebuilding.

But in Gaza, even cement is political, and plans for reconstruction are caught in a web of fraught relationships that could take months to untangle.

Aid agencies expect several hundred million dollars to be pledged at a conference next week for items like food, medicine and spare parts for electrical grids. But that does not touch the broader question of rebuilding, which will require large quantities of cement, metal and glass, all of which Gaza lacks.

The task is enormous: An estimated 4,000 homes were destroyed and 17,000 damaged in the three-week war that began Dec. 27, Palestinian authorities said.

Israel said that letting such supplies in freely would be risky. Hamas militants have built rockets from pipes imported for a sanitation plant last year, Israeli officials said, and while Israel is attending to humanitarian aid — the number of trucks with food and other urgent supplies that now pass through Israeli crossings into Gaza has tripled — the Israeli authorities have yet to decide what else they will permit into Gaza.

“We are studying it,” Isaac Herzog, the minister of welfare and social affairs, who runs Israel’s humanitarian effort in Gaza, said in a telephone interview. “The exact mechanism hasn’t been devised yet.” He added: “Israel helps fully on the humanitarian issue. Thereafter it’s a red line.”

But many here say their homes are what count, and though they are thankful for the small cash and food handouts they got from the United Nations when they left its shelters last week, their primary concern is not hunger, but homelessness.

“We don’t want money, we just want our house rebuilt,” said Ahmed el-Atar, a 39-year-old farmer, whose house was badly damaged during the war.

The issue of the border crossings is one of the most intractable and has been at the heart of Hamas’s cease-fire demands. On Sunday, a weeklong cease-fire technically ended, but a Hamas official in Egypt said Hamas had offered to extend it for a year, provided Israel opened the crossings, The Associated Press reported from Cairo. Israel, which does not talk to Hamas directly, said the Hamas offer was not new.

Ahmed el-Kurd, the minister of labor in the Hamas-run government in Gaza, stated Hamas’s view in an interview on Sunday: “The embargo is war.”

Gaza’s deficits began long before the war, with an economic embargo imposed by Israel after Hamas seized power from Fatah, a rival political party, in June 2007. Hamas is an Islamist group that is doctrinally committed to Israel’s destruction, and Israel cut off relations, arguing that a blockade would weaken the group and possibly dislodge it.

The economy shrank, with the number of trucks crossing the Israeli border each day plummeting from 500 to fewer than 100.

The embargo has paralyzed businesses like that of Mohamad Maarouf, who owns one of the biggest cement factories in Gaza City. His warehouse was empty for so long that his children began to use it for bike riding.

“It’s sleeping,” he said on Sunday, standing near a tiny plastic rocking horse. He recalled the factory’s past bustle wistfully. “It was like a beehive,” he said.

Nearly all of Gaza’s imports come through Israel, except for what moves through smuggling tunnels from Egypt, which has kept its Gaza border closed since the Hamas takeover.

The United Nations, which is handling the early aid efforts, argues that the Israeli border restrictions must be eased in order for any serious reconstruction effort to succeed.

“The crossings are critical,” said Maxwell Gaylard, a United Nations humanitarian affairs coordinator. “The U.N. system would look for a more generous response from Israel to the people of Gaza now. They’ve gone through a hard time.”

But the war does not appear to have changed the fundamental Israeli attitude about how to treat Gaza. Peter Lerner, the spokesman for the Defense Ministry’s coordination office for Gaza, said that while Israel was facilitating all humanitarian work, including allowing in cable to fix the electrical grid, it would not consider reopening the crossings fully for commercial use, and any reconstruction projects would need to be approved individually.

“We are not interested in rebuilding Hamas at any stage,” he said in a telephone interview.

Representatives of aid groups, who visited Gaza this past week to assess needs, have expressed worry. Cassandra Nelson, a spokeswoman for the relief agency Mercy Corps, said a European Union grant last year to create jobs in light construction had to be modified, because the cement and steel rods could not be imported. The money was spent instead on sewing machines.

“Are we going to rebuild everybody’s houses with plastic sheeting and duct tape?” she said.

The issue is further complicated by the division in Palestinian politics. Israel and the West want aid to flow through the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank and is dominated by Hamas’s rival, Fatah. But after being ejected from Gaza, the Palestinian Authority does not have the presence to manage aid to Gaza, and forcing the issue would serve to exacerbate the violent rivalry between Hamas and Fatah.

“Will they work by remote control?” said Ibrahim Radwan, deputy minister for public works and housing, referring to the Palestinian Authority.

Hamas, meanwhile, is stepping in to fill the gap. This week, the government will hand out checks of as much as $5,000 for those whose homes were destroyed, Mr. Radwan said.

In Mr. Atar’s neighborhood, they already started. He pulled five crisp hundred-dollar bills out of an envelope from Hamas’s Public Affairs Department.

“Somebody wrote my name down,” he said, staring blankly, his small daughter at his side gnawing on a radish. “Somebody knows I am here.”

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